shitty drivers, rendering artifacts in lots of games, crashes due to overheating at times due to driver issues, and not throttling back the card in the warmer months. I will still probably stick with amd however. I have had too many issues with nvidea and poor QA and them shipping defective chips to 3rd party manufacturers and then not standing behind them so they don't want to fix blatant known issues that many people are having under warranty.

That definitely sounds more like a defective card. I've had more than a few histories with a shit driver release but those other issues are absolutely a defective card (heat especially, that will cause artifacting. usually followed by crashes). Overall their drivers aren't that bad (and weren't). I only updated drivers when I needed to, always did it that way. Some notes on certain driver versions: they did add or stress certain features more and if there was a hardware fault it would absolutely activate it and make it a point of total card failure later on.

On that note: Fuck Crimson. I still have an old CCC installed with the driver i wanted (install crimson first, then the beta CCC that was the last CCC version made). I like my color/gamma controls through that, fuckers. Windows color correction is a joke and won't work on multiple monitor setups.

These days both 3rd party ship chips so finding a good manufacturer can be a bitch. Especially for warranty issues.

I tried nshittya 3 times. 2/3 cards were DOA, years apart before those purchases. 3rd buy worked but didn't solve the issue I had. Sold it and shipped it to someone else. The refund process wasn't worth it.